A Hidden Staggering Beauty.

February 23, 2022 9:02 PM

Try Weird Fruit. A Letter of Recommendatioin from the NYT. "...Some astronauts report experiencing the “overview effect,” a sense of mental clarity and connectedness to humankind that overcomes them when they look down at Earth from space. I feel that on a cellular level when I pick up a mangosteen, a celestial-purple orb with a flower-stem hat. It looks as if it were conceived for a Miyazaki film, its proportions so cutesy that it demands to be anthropomorphized. Inside are pillowy white segments, oneiric in texture and taste, with notes of pineapple, strawberry, lychee and your most carefree memory of childhood. The experience is no less expansive than seeing the ocean or hearing a Chopin nocturne for the first time. "

"Most fruits I try only a couple of times, because I am an incorrigible neophile. But there’s one I keep returning to: the soursop, a member of the Annonaceae family and relative of the cherimoya and pawpaw. From the outside, it looks like a spiny reptile curled into itself or some sort of prehistoric football. It splits like flesh — with a hand on each half you feel violent, as though you’re tearing through ligaments — but spoons like custard. At optimal ripeness, the soursop tastes like the platonic ideal of tropical fruit: a beguiling combination of citrus, banana, pineapple, strawberry and papaya."

Also featured: Cotton candy grapes. Ice cream bean. Dragonfruit. Oro Blanco. Pinkglow Pineapple. The Lulo. And so on.

posted by storybored (66 comments total)

One thing that boggles my mind is that the pawpaw and dragonfruit are considered, by white Americans, to be impossibly exotic, and yet they are both native to different parts of the US. By a similar token, if you visit supermarkets in Singapore, they are full of apples and other fruits that are completely not native to the local climate, but there's that strong Eurocentric bias in what gets considered to be "normal" fruit (leaving aside, admittedly, that in Singapore's case, there may also be a northeast Asian bias involved as well).

On the other hand, well. Once in a while I think about how Kumail Nanjiani has a bit in his standup special about how everyone in India has a passionately-told story about the best mango they'd ever eaten. I absolutely loved that bit and found it incredibly relatable, simply because I totally understand feeling that way about good food. But recently, I had a yellow mango that was merely pretty good, and suddenly I very viscerally get how a truly great mango could feel positively life-changing.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:57 PM on February 23, 2022 [18 favorites]

Mangosteens also look more than a little like tiny cartoon bombs. They look like something Link would pluck from a sprout on the ground and blow up a wall with before a new one grows back.
posted by wanderingmind at 10:29 PM on February 23, 2022 [8 favorites]

Apropos of your comment, DoctorFedora, I think I would probably have my mind blown if I made more effort to Try Good Fruit That I Think I Already Know.

I grew up in apple country, and therefore don’t often eat apples unless I’m home - most of the apples in the US are one or the other flavor equivalent of the crayons in an off-brand crayon box, and I either get little pleasure or active anti-pleasure from eating them. On the other hand, home-apples are transporting and wild, sweet, juicy, complex. The same is true for raspberries, which were most delicately delicious eaten while sitting under the canes that grew around my garage, and which I can hardly bear to see at the grocery store, massive, hard things that look like the teeth of mutant red sharks, with too many rows.

I’ve definitely had transcendent experiences with oranges and strawberries, suddenly shocked and delighted by a thing that makes all previous things of its kind seem like cheap imitations. Eating a Concord grape for the first time taught me why the rich kids growing up had Welch’s grape juice; my first fresh apricot when I was in my late teens astounded me, because it tasted like the dried ones, but lush and new and bursting with lifeforce.

What must that be like for cherries, pears, plums, peaches, blackberries, gooseberries, prickly-pears, whatever is the *local*, non-exotic section of the goblin market? Have mercy. Rediscovering what’s been under my nose all this time. I’ve got my work cut out for me!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:30 PM on February 23, 2022 [17 favorites]

I am remembering an LA-born friend’s stories of driving outside of town and paying some guy sitting on the back of a truck at the side of the highway three dollars to eat as many white peaches as they could fit. Life!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:33 PM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

oh man yes it blew my mind out the window the first time I had a dark purple grape with seeds in it, as opposed to those crunchy but mostly meh seedless grapes from South America that are ubiquitous in the US. Like, oh, so this is what Grape Flavor is trying to taste like
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:57 PM on February 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

Apropos DoctorFedora above, these are only "weird" fruit for what amounts to a small global minority. They're perfectly ordinary, everyday fruit for a global majority, but they're not white and not from countries that Americans can identify on a map. Although it's well-intended, this piece continues a legacy of completely unexamined US supremacism that denies the lived experience of most of the world, and it makes me cross.
posted by prismatic7 at 10:59 PM on February 23, 2022 [14 favorites]

Sadly, I cannot read the article because it is behind a papaya wall.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 11:21 PM on February 23, 2022 [39 favorites]

Eating one perfectly ripe banana from a market in Yaoundé back in 2004 completely ruined me for US supermarket bananas, ever since.

Likewise, picking ripe cherries from a tree in the French countryside on a June afternoon and eating them at dinner that same evening has meant no more possible enjoyment to be had from those hard, flavorless cousins in the fruit aisle at the store.

Ditto, growing up in Georgia and enjoying ripe peaches, plums, tomatoes and watermelon in season, straight from the garden.

I will say, though, that frozen fruit often comes quite close to some of my best ripe fruit experiences. Frozen peaches, cherries, blueberries, etc. bring those memorable experiences almost back into reach.
posted by darkstar at 11:25 PM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Seconding the bristle at the unspoken suprematism that is rife in similar “innocent” exociticism… The privilege that underpinned my getting to experience soursop/guanábana - it left an indelible imprint, a rainbow of flavor unlike any other - weighed on me then and now. Fruit and flowers are such powerful semaphores, their stories so often an illumination of human erring, and so their framing is critically significant.
posted by progosk at 12:08 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Lowtax ruined mangosteens for me.
posted by ryanrs at 1:06 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Flock of Cynthiabirds, here you go.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:28 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love picking up “weird fruit” to try with my son. We did once try dragonfruit and were kind of disappointed - it looks cool, but there really wasn’t much in the way of flavor. Maybe we had a bad one?

Pawpaw though. This white American used to pick them off the trees as a kid growing up in southwest Michigan. They are pretty good. I never thought of them as exotic, just not a fruit you find in stores.

My major issue with store fruit is that it’s bred for color above all else. Red delicious apples, the gene that makes them striped also makes them taste good, that was bred out of them to get the platonic ideal apple red color but that’s also what made them taste like wet sawdust. Strawberries, the store ones are the size of small apples. They also taste like cardboard compared to the tiny ones you can find growing wild along the roadsides up north. Blueberries - grown in Georgia or Mexico, they are the size of grapes, and they are a pale shadow of the flavor found in a tiny wild blueberry from the sandy soils of northern Michigan. Blueberries need to suffer to taste good, goddamnit, you can’t grow them in warm climates and expect them to turn out right!

The best fruits are found wild. Discovering a patch of ripe blueberries, tripping across wild strawberries, stripping the wild raspberry canes clean while wandering through the woods, picking huckleberries as a kid out west, introducing a friend to mulberries or wintergreen berries (the flavor you think of as wintergreen comes from the leaves, not the berries!)… Once found a whole patch of albino strawberries, they were green and turned white when ripe, tasted wonderful. Came across a patch of thimbleberries when backpacking, sat and ate some while waiting for the rest of the crew to catch up. These are some of my best memories growing up.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:14 AM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think I would probably have my mind blown if I made more effort to Try Good Fruit That I Think I Already Know.

I thoroughly recommend the experience of biting into a perfectly ripe nectarine after deferring all consumption of anything but water for three days beforehand.
posted by flabdablet at 5:15 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mangosteens also look more than a little like tiny cartoon bombs. They look like something Link would pluck from a sprout on the ground and blow up a wall with before a new one grows back.

I had a similar reaction the first time I went shopping for produce in Japan. All of my video game training has taught me that half the stuff on the shelves is a powerup!
posted by mhoye at 5:18 AM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Those smallish-clingstone early summer South Carolina/Georgia Peaches bought at a roadside stand off a rural highway, ideally when you're on the way to the beach, are truly one of life's most sublime pleasures.
posted by thivaia at 5:26 AM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

I lived in Malaysia for a year (coming from Canada) and even though it was a depressingly long time ago, SO MANY of my favourite memories are fruit-related. Soursop is my very favourite, mangosteen can be amazing, I do have a memory of the best mango I've ever eaten, I still dream of fresh calamansi juice... but durian. Blew my mind.

I wouldn't say that I'm a fan, but there was one night that my host family brought home bags and bags of durian and had a big tasting party with all their friends. They would crack one open and everyone would talk about it like it was wine! I got to taste a dozen or more different durian that night, and they really did all have their own personality. Some of them I liked, some I didn't, and some I REALLY did. It was definitely an expansive experience.

I moved to Vancouver a couple of years ago, and tried persimmon for the first time. Un-fucking-believable. Up there with soursop.
posted by arcticwoman at 6:34 AM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

My MiL's family grew up in West Africa and maintained that the correct way to eat mangoes was in the bath.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:43 AM on February 24, 2022 [15 favorites]

My MiL's family grew up in West Africa and maintained that the correct way to eat mangoes was in the bath.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:43 AM on February 24
[−] [!]


Alexa, add mangoes to grocery list.
posted by arcticwoman at 6:47 AM on February 24, 2022

Once in a while I think about how Kumail Nanjiani has a bit in his standup special about how everyone in India has a passionately-told story about the best mango they'd ever eaten.

For some reason I can only find a facebook link, but I think you're thinking of a bit by Hari Kondabolu, not Kumail Nanjiani.
posted by Think_Long at 6:54 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Fun, more fruits to try! It's one of my favorite things about international travel, eating the new fruits. I also love how easy it is... just stay at a mediocre hotel anywhere with breakfast included, and blammo! At least two new types of local fruit to try if you're in a new to you region, fruit-wise.
posted by Grither at 7:14 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

The more I think about the phrase "oneiric in texture" the less I understand what it's supposed to mean
posted by ook at 7:22 AM on February 24, 2022

One thing that boggles my mind is that the pawpaw and dragonfruit are considered, by white Americans, to be impossibly exotic, and yet they are both native to different parts of the US.

Agreed. Though, I've been actively trying to find a pawpaw while living in pawpaw country for the last six years without success. I've not been trying too terribly actively, but have genuinely spent something like ten hours of real, if sporadic effort. I've still never had one, 'cause I can neither find nor buy them. I've gone hunting in a park named Pawpaw and a town named Pawpaw without any luck. And other places based on both random internet searches and askmefi responses.

Dragonfruit, on the other hand, is in the supermarket year round. Often two varieties. (As is soursop, which isn't really my bag, but was worth trying a few times.) Sadly, the dragonfruit plants filling an inconveniently large part of my home do flower, but I haven't figured out how to pollinate them. Nothing I've tried has worked. .

My spouse's grandfather who mostly grew up on the US East Coast in the '20s had stories about learning about bananas for the first time. I think my love for bananas - at least the good ones - was actually the thing that convinced him I might be an acceptable partner for his kid.
posted by eotvos at 7:24 AM on February 24, 2022

This post reminds me of Jennette Fulda, whose weight loss blog I used to read. She had a monthly post called “Lick the Produce”, where she’d try something new from the produce aisle. It made eating healthier stuff seem kind of fun, and encouraged me to do the same.
posted by jenh526 at 7:33 AM on February 24, 2022

There's a pretty good documentary called "The Fruit Hunters" (based on a book of the same name) that covers a lot of the same ground here.

Here's the trailer, looks like maybe it's streaming on Amazon.
posted by jeremias at 7:43 AM on February 24, 2022

One thing I didn't really get until recently was persimmons. They grow locally but the varietals aren't native to the area (Pacific NW). They're not all that common and the ones at grocery stores are overpriced and trash. Hard as rocks. Flavorless or astringent.

I was curious enough to give them another go at a local farmer's market. They were soft Fuyu's, mildly cheaper, and SO FRICKIN GOOD. Texture of (overripe apricot)+(perfectly ripe peach), sweetness of peach, flavor of (apricot)+(mango)+(mild apple)+(something very different). I felt like I had been cheated by all the years of disliking persimmons, and I wonder what other fruits/foods I've held a distaste for simply from illegitimate prejudice.

Eat persimmons when they're in season, and buy local.
posted by Philipschall at 7:44 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you're looking for more exotic-to-Americans fruits, Salak aka "snakefruit" is a really good one I rarely see mentioned -- I'm curious why nobody's tried mass-marketing it, it's tasty, different enough in flavor from standard western fare to be interesting, but not different enough to intimidate people who find e.g. passionfruit confusing, and seems like it'd store and ship really well (at least based on how long they lasted rattling around in the bottom of my backpack).

Our grocery in Western MA briefly carried Monstera fruit; those were pretty tasty too but a little messy and unwieldy, I wasn't too surprised when they stopped stocking them.
posted by ook at 7:47 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I came here to comment about how there's nothing "weird" about most of these fruits to people living where I am, and was pleased to see that the very first comment by DoctorFedora nailed it. Good job Metafilter!

The eurocentricity of what counts as "normal" when it comes to fruits really bothers me. Like, when kids here learn about fruits, they learn about apples, oranges and pears. But, why?! Why not mangoes, durians, langsats, rambutans? Similarly, why do pre-school kids first learn about the spring, summer, autumn and winter, instead of the dry and monsoon seasons? But anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, sorry for the derail.
posted by destrius at 7:52 AM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

I was lucky to grow up with a couple of fuyu persimmon trees on national forest land a three minute walk from home. It was fantastic. (I guess we probably weren't actually allowed to pick them. But, there were still plenty for the birds.) Also, elderberries, and lots of other stuff that isn't in supermarkets, like sow's thistle, mustard plants, American pepper trees, mallow.

In college I was lucky enough to sublet an apartment with a second story window that opened into an absurdly abundant loquat tree. I ate mostly that for months. Later I moved in next to someone with a mulberry tree and discovered that those exist. There are so many fruits that never show up even in "foreign" supermarkets.
posted by eotvos at 8:08 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

(Which reminds me of a story that may not mean much to anybody else but always makes me giggle. I was hanging out with a few US work colleagues in Chile and walking along a rural road in the middle of nowhere, an hour's drive from a hospital. There was a pepper tree by the side of the road with ripe fruit. So, just like I did as a child, I grabbed a handfull of kernels and threw them into my mouth. Everyone else panicked as though I'd just stabbed a kitchen knife into my eye. I realize grabbing red berries off trees looks dangerous. . . but, I had no doubt that it was the same tree I'd eaten from as a kid. Nobody else had ever known they were edible.)
posted by eotvos at 8:13 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Later I moved in next to someone with a mulberry tree and discovered that those exist.

If you get an empty tin can, and cut a narrow V into one side with a pair of tinsnips, and then tape it to a long pole, you can reach it over the back fence and harvest mulberries or loquats or feijoas or passionfruit from neighbours' trees and vines that the neighbours would most likely never have bothered to collect on their own.

Or so I've heard.
posted by flabdablet at 8:14 AM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Just to echo what's been said above: please be conscious of the ways discourse of "weird" and "exotic" foods and fruits can be alienating to Mefites for whom these are just normal fruits. The author of the piece has situated it in terms of what's familiar vs new for her Chinese-Canadian background, and she's mostly just advocating trying new things whatever is new for you, but the general point is always worth keeping front-of-mind in this type of discussion.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:20 AM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

If I moved I would greatly miss access to Pomelo. If you travel, you should look up local fruits to try--there are many great things not available where you live.
posted by joelr at 8:21 AM on February 24, 2022

Thanks, flabdablet. Sadly, I'm thousands of miles away, and the neighbors divorced and moved. (If anybody's looking to move to Pasadena, CA, US, I can point you to a rental with a really great mulberry tree.) At the time, their two ~8 year old kids would bring me cups of berries, which I think was a non-contractual excuse to play with our cat, or possibly just hang out for a few minutes without their parents. It was a pretty great deal.
posted by eotvos at 8:25 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sadly, I'm thousands of miles away

I did recommend a long pole.
posted by flabdablet at 8:28 AM on February 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

the [persimmons] at grocery stores are overpriced and trash. Hard as rocks. Flavorless or astringent.

Persimmons are nasty to eat until they're overripe to the point of being on the turn, by which time they're way too soft to transport in commercial quantities. You can, however, pick them early and they'll continue to ripen while off the tree, and that's how the grocery store ones work. If you buy persimmons, wait until they're squishy-soft before trying to eat them. You might well be surprised at how good a grocery store persimmon can be.

Much the same applies to grocery store bananas and avocados, though they're better when not quite as far gone as a persimmon needs to be. Grocery store tomatoes, though, are as irredeemable as grocery store eggs. Back yard grown or gtfo.
posted by flabdablet at 8:37 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Persimmons are nasty to eat until they're overripe to the point of being on the turn, by which time they're way too soft to transport in commercial quantities.

This is also true for papaya, btw. You need to wait for the papaya to be on the verge of going mouldy before you eat it, at which point it is a deep orange, softer than a ripe pear, and beautifully sweet with none of that sourish milky flavours you get from less ripe fruit. Never eat a papaya that you can't turn into mush by just squeezing it.
posted by destrius at 8:44 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

I respect destrius' opinion and recognize it is probably far more popular than mine, but, I also strongly disagree. Slightly crunchy and sour is the way to eat papaya. Everything more ripe is only good for licuados or freezing. (If we shop together, everything in the market will make someone happy!)
posted by eotvos at 8:52 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you buy persimmons, wait until they're squishy-soft before trying to eat them.

Or, try drying them; it's a thing in Georgia (the country) and many Asian cultures; normally I can only stand the firm vanilla/fuyu persimmons, but this reworks the squishy ones into something between dates and figs.
posted by progosk at 9:06 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Peaches from Sumida's in Perry, Utah.♡ The peaches bloom in Perry usually the second week of April, they are a beautiful sight. The apricots around the 4th of July are the best. The peaches come on up there in mid-August through September. There are lots of fruit and vegetable stands along Hwy 89, above Ogden, Utah, on what is called "The Fruitway." They are loaded with the goodness of summer all the way through Halloween. They include home canned jams and and goodies.


Mangosteens, when they dry, the outer skin comes off, leaving a beautiful dried replica, I have had three of them in my glass cabinet to look at for a coupla years now. Their shell turns into something like pressed board when you cut them open, to see what's there once the outer skin lets go.

My neighbors across the street grow two kinds of mangoes, and guavas, papayas, oranges, and avocados. Estella gave me a couple of the small, yellow mangoes and they were the best ever of mangoes for me. Some time ago they started an avocado out front, sheltered by another tree. Since I have lived here, they have slowly taken away huge limbs of the sheltering, fruitless tree, and the avocado is taller than two stories.

Here is something from my area, Moon Drop grapes. I had some, they are tasty and so awesome. As much as the owners of this patent tried, I had these grapes under a different name, Sweet Saphire grapes. Here is another picture.
posted by Oyéah at 9:30 AM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

It's been three years since my last home visit to Shanghai, and fruits I miss from there are:
persimmons, kumquat, loquat, lychee, longan, pomelo, bayberry (impossible to get out of its brief season), duran. Mangosteens doesn't even make the list (though to be fair I didn't grow up eating it.) A newly openly Chinese grocery store near us carries about half of these in the list most of the time, yay me.

Cherries (车厘子) are considered quite the exotic import there, and have the price to match that designation.
posted by of strange foe at 10:09 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh man, make sure you get buy in from whomever is in your life even tangentially before eating durian. I had to furtively eat one next to a trash dumpster so that it would not remotely stink up the house and I still get side-eye from my wife about having it in the trunk of the car for five minutes double bagged in plastic.

As for persimmons, it's not just ripening they need but bletting. Stuff the ones sold as Hachiya in a paper bag with some bananas or apples until soft, or better yet make hoshigaki which is delicious like candy. Fuyu persimmons are much less astringent and can be eaten while still firm.

I miss eating fresh quince. I know I'm a bit of a freak for enjoying it. Most people poach it or turn it into fruit leather or membrillo or do something to make it less astringent.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:17 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

I can't remember the last time I ate a good mango. It's like when people talk about the Mars bars of the early 1990s or late 1980s: except in my case, I don't think anyone changed the recipe... I just moved away from mango country to USA, and it never makes sense to travel back to mango country in mango season because (north-eastern) USA is sublime at that time of year while mango season in mango country is murder.

Now I keep buying cases of it from the local south asian grocery stores like a chump every summer, and the taste of a good mango recedes ever further in my memory.
posted by MiraK at 10:43 AM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

mulberry tree and discovered that those exist.

I get the sense that mulberries have sort of been rediscovered in the last decade as I see more urban foragers scoping out the trees grown in public or semi-wild areas. I also see them more frequently at the organic market, fresh and dried. I have a tree in my backyard and it is usually a race between me and the animal population to get them, though my tree produces a lot so I usually get enough for myself. Rats and raccoons really seem to like mulberries though and they are really messy. Now that I have a dog I wonder what he'll think of that?

I miss eating fresh quince.

Like eating an apple? Wow you have tough teeth. I really love the smell and taste of quince but I usually poach or make membrillo. Also I accidentally allowed some quince juice I had to ferment slightly and that was a tasty back of the fridge discovery.

There's also this guy, Weird Explorer. Yeah he is called Weird Explorer and he can be better with the othering but he isn't terrible.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:47 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some of my best memories of travel revolve around fresh fruits. If you've never had truly ripe pineapple, it is a revelation. Stalls at the markets in Thailand served it with salt and chili oil which inexplicably just made the fruit sweeter. Mangosteens are incredible and I miss them dearly, the dusty ghosts I've been able to find in stores in the US can't possibly compare, though the canned juice brings back memories. Fresh prickly pear straight from the cactus, after burning away the hundreds of tiny hairlike spines with a blow torch. Passionfruit plucked from a vine growing on someone's wall in southern California. Wintergreen berries growing wild in the northeast, literally tasting like tiny balls of gum. Pawpaw has evaded my searches as well, sadly. Someday I'll find you.

Thimbleberries are prolific in the pacific northwest, but they are an ephemeral fruit, like a super soft raspberry that melts into goo mere hours after gathering, so you'll never see them in a store. They taste like raspberries turned up to 11, sharp and sweet and tangy. I once made an amazing jam, but I had to set up my canning apparatus at my campsite, and make sure that the only thing that entered the pan I gathered them into was clean fruit - even rinsing would have destroyed them. It was a day-long ordeal but every bit worth it, especially eaten with goat cheese on crackers.

All summer long on hikes I scan the woods like a hungry bird looking for tart little huckleberries, pinkish-orange salmonberries, sticky-sweet but bland salal. The tiny creeping native blackberries that get lost in the underbrush are so flavorful, overshadowed by the vast thickets of their blander himalayan cousins. Sometimes I hit the jackpot and find a hill covered with fingernail-sized alpine strawberries, and I marvel at how shallow an imitation the ones in the grocery store are. (I managed to grow some of my own last year, but they somehow always go straight into my mouth so I haven't managed to can any.) Lilacs aren't a fruit but make a wonderful jelly which tastes like they smell. Dandelion wine is bottled summer and makes for great gifts.

Thanks for the reminder to try new things! I highly recommend folks do some reading on the edible native plants in your area, as others have said, the key is fresh and ripe. As long as you're mindful to not gather anything too close to a road or that has been sprayed by commercial pesticides it can be a delightful treasure hunt, secret flavors you will never find anywhere else.
posted by Feyala at 11:45 AM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

> Never eat a papaya that you can't turn into mush by just squeezing it.

Pears, on the other hand, are best eaten when they're crunchy like apples. I don't mind a mushy pear but I don't know how that became the standard.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:51 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of the things I loved about Brazil was the enormous variety of fruits, most of which have no English name at all, and in any given place some are regional and surprising even to Brazilians from other parts of the country. So many delicious fruits. Raw, in sorbets, in ice cream, as drinks. Fruity fruit fruit fruit. Frutas.

I also learned that you can cannot describe flavours except in terms of other flavours, and so when there is a note or combo that's really unique, you can only say: a mango tastes of mango.

The experience of being unable to enjoy a fruit from your supermarket once you know what it's really like at its peak is very common, I think.

Finally, I did a fun thing earlier this week. I rode my bike through Christchurch's red zone, where there used to be houses but they were bulldozed after the quakes when the land was deemed too unstable to allow rebuilding. All the suburban garden fruit trees are still standing. It's late summer here, and whenever I spotted an apple or a plum or a pear tree that looked especially likely, I picked a ripe, sun-warm fruit to snack on. They were delicious.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:03 PM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Also, for those who mostly get their produce from the supermarket... even if you live in a nice urban area, it is worth your time to visit the hinterlands near you and seek out what grows near you WHEN IT IS IN SEASON. There is a mile of difference between a cold storage Granny Smith in February and a just-picked Stayman Winesap in the third week of October. My friend was visiting this summer at my house. It was August. I had some peaches in the fridge. I offered her a peach. She said she didn't really like peaches that well. I allowed as how they were QUITE good, tho, and I must have been convincing. They were, to be fair, peaches from the farmer's market, grown locally, soft enough that they'd bruise if you looked at them wrong and ripe enough that you could nip the skin and slip off huge sections of peel leaving immaculate yellow flesh behind. She accepted a peach and a (clean) kitchen towel. Afterward: I didn't know that they could taste like that.
posted by which_chick at 2:04 PM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

we just got our first Own Yard & taquito boyfriend has been obsessively planting tropical etc. fruit trees, I think we've got a longan (my favorite), a hachiya persimmon (he likes these more than Fuyu when eaten at maximum squishiness), couple-three sapotes of various kinds, three or maybe seven by now guavas, a jaboticaba, a peanut butter fruit, various pomegranates, a couple kumquats, and about thirty goji berry sprouts under a heat lamp in the kitchen near where the bitter melon vines used to be... I'm probably forgetting something... oh a buddha's hand & a calamondin (the calamondin is specifically earmarked for sisig)

anyway the kumquats are popping off but otherwise none of these have fruited yet like at all, so I still have no idea what a peanut butter fruit tastes like

we did get two fruits off of his miracle fruit tree & had a little flavor tripping date, which was DELIGHTFUL; the seeds from those are more sprouts under a heat lamp now

also gotten ample jujubes off a tree that was here when we moved in

I guess what I'm saying with this comment is give me six years & I'll host the fruit party
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:09 PM on February 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

A perfectly ripe Ontario Bartlett pear is at least the equal of any other fruit on earth.
posted by brachiopod at 2:47 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Grew up with mulberry trees in the yard, no thanks. Even to one of the pies my mother would make from them.

Mangosteen, however - I traveled to Singapore and Malaysia just to taste durian and mangosteen, and the latter did not disappoint. Although you can find frozen durian in the Chinese supermarket, can't find mangosteen in America (or if you do they usually suck).
posted by Rash at 3:25 PM on February 24, 2022

I bought mangosteens in Bakersfield, and have urban foraged loquats.
posted by Oyéah at 5:16 PM on February 24, 2022

The fruit I miss the most from traveling in Asia is the wax apple. Ice cold from the fridge on a hot day, amazing. Also I'm a durian fiend. Luckily durians and papayas are much easier to get in CA these days, but what I'd give for wax apples!!
posted by extramundane at 5:25 PM on February 24, 2022

I wonder if I've never had a good papaya. I've had several, in many different parts of the world, and never liked them. Is it me, or is it them?
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:35 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah I thought I never liked papaya until I had some really good ones in Taiwan... the ones I had before tasted like feet.
posted by extramundane at 5:56 PM on February 24, 2022

The smaller Hawaiian papaya are sublime. The larger Mexican papaya have no taste, in comparison.
posted by Rash at 9:21 PM on February 24, 2022

I can’t believe we’ve made it this far in the thread and nobody has mentioned the husk cherry, aka ground cherry, aka cape gooseberry.

It is the best fruit.
posted by slateyness at 9:31 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I grew up in a Midwest food dessert. The produce we could get was so bad, I genuinely thought I didn’t like any type of fruit.

The first time I had Mangosteen, it was still banned in the US. One of the line cooks at a restaurant I worked stuffed suitcase full during a trip. It was delicious. Amazing. I credit it with changing my mind about fruit and my diet. Now I’m fortunate enough to afford a CSA and I get a box of local organic produce on my doorstep. It’s allowed me to try somethings I’m not very into (fennel, persimmons) and some mind blowing delicacies (tiny amazing blueberries, passion fruit.) But I will never forget that first perfect mangosteen.
posted by Pretty Good Talker at 11:16 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agreed. Though, I've been actively trying to find a pawpaw while living in pawpaw country for the last six years without success. I've not been trying too terribly actively, but have genuinely spent something like ten hours of real, if sporadic effort. I've still never had one, 'cause I can neither find nor buy them. I've gone hunting in a park named Pawpaw and a town named Pawpaw without any luck. And other places based on both random internet searches and askmefi responses.

Finding pawpaws:
I see lots of small pawpaw trees in the Ohio woods. But ones with fruit are much less common. The leaves are easy to identify: they are larger than most of the oaks, maples, etc, and are wider toward the tip than the stem end.

The easiest time to spot them is just after most other trees have dropped their leaves. The pawpaw leaves are yellow and stay on the trees a little longer. Come back the next year to see if they have fruits.
posted by jjj606 at 6:00 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

A pawpaw was my most amazing fruit experience. My dad got into pawpaws for a while and would come home with randomly gathered wild fruit, by him and the pawpaw breeders he was talking to. And in the wild they are variable as hell. Most more towards the papaya side and a bit stringy, but there was this one that was the texture and taste of the best vanilla custard, smooth and creamy and a gentle but rich vanilla flavor with just a lovely touch of fruit and floral. We all tasted it and agreed that if you could only breed that consistently it would be one of the best selling fruits in the country... if you could transport it, that is.
posted by tavella at 9:11 AM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I used to work with pears, and am now quite attached to a variety I’m unlikely to get any way besides driving 300 miles to my old job at the right time of year and finding and chatting with my old “work dad”, who will offer me a box. There used to be a regular stream of folks trying to cop their particular favorites coming through my office on the way to the cooler. I strongly recommend trying different varieties of familiar fruits if you get a chance, u-picks tend to be great for this (you can also dial in your preferred ripeness). One Green World is a nursery that specializes in unusual fruits and their website is a fun browse.

One of my current coworkers has a pet project fruit demonstration orchard, with gojis and clove currants and pawpaws and other delicious things. I need to cultivate that friendship, because he knows the home orchard society folks and can probably hook me up with native North American persimmons, which can apparently grow out here but get way too big for my tiny yard.

I still haven’t had a medlar, that might be a project for this fall.
posted by momus_window at 9:56 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah just coming back to say: my best fruit experience might have been a cashew apple. Cashew nuts are actually inside a fruit, the cashew apple. The fruit spoils almost as soon as it is ripe, so you can only get them in a market in places where cashews grow. When they are unripe the juice is very irritating and can burn people with sensitive skin. There is only a small window when they are both edible and very delicious. They're in the same family as mangoes, and they have that same mixture of resinous and acrid notes mixed in with the sweetness and unctuous texture. Bought some in a market in Salvador BA. Fantastic.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:35 PM on February 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

Quenepa is a slightly more distant cousin of the mango that’s absolutely worth seeking out. Texture-wise, it can be like sucking on a golf ball covered in a thin layer of slime, but it’s really delicious slime.
posted by mubba at 3:52 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yes to trying 'weird' (aka new to you) fruit! We had a fresh passionfruit recently that I spied at the grocery store, and remembered my Brasilian coworker in San Francisco ten years ago who said she could never find fresh passionfruit in the states.

I also second the recommendation for One Green World (and wish their website would let you search by planting zone). Last fall we planted one sweet and one sour cherry tree, a serviceberry, several kinds of gooseberry, a thornless blackberry, a raspberry, a Crandall's clove currant that may or may not survive the relentless attacks of our foster puppies this winter, some lingonberries (bonus: evergreen foliage!), honey berries (aka haksaps), and I just picked up a Chicago hardy fig for $10 at the hardware store last week.

Yes, I went a little overboard. New yard!
posted by deludingmyself at 12:05 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Our grocery in Western MA briefly carried Monstera fruit

Oh wow, houseplant fruit, mind blown!
posted by deludingmyself at 12:08 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

A gardener I follow on YouTube managed to grow and harvest a Monstera fruit: Monstera Deliciosa Fruit Harvest & Tasting! Possibly the best fruit I've ever eaten!!!
posted by Lexica at 2:01 PM on February 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

You're sayin' my monstera is holding out on me?
posted by Oyéah at 3:35 PM on February 26, 2022 [2 favorites]